David Boles: Human Meme

Today we celebrate the completion of a project seven years in the making. The third volume of the ASL Linguistics for Practitioners series, Beyond the Hands: Non-Manual Grammar, Discourse Structure, and Sentence Types in American Sign Language, co-authored with Janna Sweenie, is now available. This episode explores what the book is, why it matters, and what it reveals about language, embodiment, and the nature of human communication. Let me begin with a claim that may seem strange if your experience with language has been limited to speaking and listening: The face is grammar. Not expression. Not emotion. Not accompaniment. Grammar. In American Sign Language, the eyebrows mark the difference between a statement and a question. The mouth produces morphemes that modify meaning. The head nods and shakes with grammatical force. The eyes point to referents and track agreement across discourse. The body shifts to mark perspective and emphasis.

You have a number. Not your phone number. Not your social security number, though that one matters more than most of us like to think about. I mean another number, one that follows you through databases you will never see, aggregated from purchases you barely remember making, from the length of time you hovered over a photograph before scrolling past, from the route you took to work last Tuesday and whether you lingered outside that coffee shop or walked directly to the train. This number has a name in China. They call it a Social Credit Score. But the American version has no single name because it has no single keeper. It lives distributed across credit bureaus and insurance actuaries, across hiring algorithms and rental application systems, across the predictive models that decide whether you see an advertisement for a luxury watch or a payday loan. You did not consent to being numbered. But you are numbered nonetheless.

Let me start with a confession. Classifiers are hard. Not hard in the way vocabulary is hard, where you simply need more exposure, more repetition, more time. Classifiers are hard because they require signers to think spatially while signing temporally, to track multiple referents while producing new content, to select among productive options while maintaining discourse coherence. That mouthful of a sentence appears in the opening of Depicting Space, and I want to unpack it for you, because hidden inside that description is something important about human cognition. When you speak English, your words unfold in time. One after another. Linear. Sequential. The sentence has a beginning, a middle, an end. You cannot say two words simultaneously. The channel is narrow. But when you sign ASL, something different happens. Your hands can represent two entities at once. Your face carries grammatical information independent of your hands. Your body can shift to become a character while your hands continue to manipulat

For Civility Certified, I worked with three sources. The first is Martin Luther's 95 Theses from 1517. Luther posted his propositions to the church door at Wittenberg, demanding that the institution admit what it was doing - selling salvation, monetizing grace, creating a credential system for the afterlife. The structure of numbered propositions, posted to the institutional door, demanding accountability - that form echoes throughout this novella. There is a character who writes theses. The institution does not welcome them. The second source is Jefferson Davis's address to the Confederate Congress in 1861. This gave me the rhetorical DNA of exclusion dressed as protection. Davis spoke of voluntary participation, states' rights, procedural legitimacy - all while encoding slavery into the constitutional fabric of the Confederacy. The Civic Trust & Access Authority in my novella speaks in that register. It promises safety. It delivers sorting. The third source is Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin fro

Have you ever dreamed something true? Not metaphorically true. Not symbolically true. Actually true. You dreamed your phone would ring, and it rang. You dreamed someone was sick before anyone told you. You dreamed a door opening that hadn't opened yet. Most of us have had this experience at least once. We wake up unsettled, the dream still clinging, and then something happens that makes us pause. Makes us wonder. We shake it off. We tell ourselves it was coincidence, pattern-matching, the brain's talent for finding connections where none exist. We go on with our day. But what if you couldn't shake it off?

What does it mean to say amen? We say it reflexively. The minister concludes the prayer, and the congregation responds. Amen. So be it. Let it be done. The word carries the weight of assent, of agreement, of complicity in whatever petition has just been offered to the divine. But what happens when someone refuses to say it? I want to explore the larger project of what I've been calling Fractional Fiction. Because the two are inseparable. The methodology creates the meaning, and the meaning demands the methodology. Let me start with a scene.

The Held Land tells three stories across 159 years, all rooted in a single quarter-section of Nebraska prairie. In March 1867, Ezekiel Washington, a Black veteran of the 5th United States Colored Troops, files a homestead claim on 160 acres. He builds a soddie with his own hands, breaks the sod, plants corn, and waits for the land to become his. Five years later, a rigged hearing strips him of everything. He walks off the land he made productive with nothing but his discharge papers and disappears from the historical record.

What makes you countable? Not valuable. Not worthy. Not loved. Countable. What is it about you that allows a system to place you in a box, assign you a number, and track your existence across time? We live inside classification systems we did not choose and cannot see. Every form you have ever filled out asked you to sort yourself into categories invented by strangers. Race. Gender. Age. Income. Education. Marital status. Employment. Each checkbox a small act of self-definition performed for an audience that will never know your name. The systems do not care about you. They care about the categories. You are the instance; the category is the thing. And when the last instance of a category dies, the category closes, and the system moves on without mourning.

You inherited a debt you never agreed to pay. I want you to consider that statement before you dismiss it. Not a financial debt, not a mortgage or a student loan with your signature on the paperwork. Something older. Something that attached itself to your bloodline before you were born, before your parents were born, before anyone now living had any say in the matter. This is not metaphor. This is how land works in America. The house you grew up in, the town where you learned to read, the state whose history you memorized in school, all of it sits on ground that belonged to someone else first. The transfer was not clean. The transfer was never clean. And the people who were displaced did not disappear. Their descendants are still here, still remembering, still holding ledgers that no one on the other side wants to examine.

When we encounter disability, most of us have been trained to see deficiency. Something missing. Something wrong. A departure from the norm that requires correction, accommodation, or at minimum, sympathy. This is the meme of the broken body, and it has replicated through Western culture for centuries. The meme manifests in our language. We speak of people "suffering from" conditions rather than "living with" them. We describe someone as "wheelchair-bound" rather than "wheelchair-using," as though the chair were a prison rather than a tool. We praise disabled people for "overcoming" their disabilities, as if the goal of every disabled life should be to approximate able-bodied existence as closely as possible. The meme manifests in our narratives. Stories about disabled characters tend to follow predictable patterns. The disabled person exists to inspire the able-bodied protagonist. The disabled person must be cured by the story's end, their disability a problem to be solved. The disabled person is saintly and

Here is something I did not expect to discover while writing a textbook about American Sign Language. The shoulder knows things the hand cannot say. That sentence sounds like metaphor. It is not. It is linguistics, documented and measurable, and it has been sitting in plain sight for as long as deaf people have been signing to each other. The position of the arm, the engagement of the shoulder, the extension or contraction of the elbow: these carry meaning. Not incidental meaning. Not decorative meaning. Semantic meaning that changes what a sign communicates even when the handshape stays exactly the same. Consider what this implies about how consciousness expresses itself through the body. We tend to think of language as something that happens in the head. Words form in the mind and then exit through the mouth, or through the fingers if we are typing, but the origin point is cognitive, neural, somewhere behind the eyes where the self is supposed to live. The body is just the delivery system. The meaning is el

What does it mean to discover that you are kin to strangers? Not metaphorically kin, not spiritually connected, but genetically linked in ways that contradict everything you were taught about who your people are and who they are not? This is the question at the center of my new novel, "The Kinship of Strangers," the third book in the Fractional Fiction series. And it is a question that has no comfortable answer, which is precisely why I needed to write about it. We live in an age of genetic revelation. For less than a hundred dollars, you can spit into a tube and receive, six weeks later, a percentage breakdown of your ancestry. You can discover relatives you never knew existed. You can trace your maternal line back through mitochondrial DNA and your paternal line through Y-chromosome markers. The technology is remarkable. What we do with the information it provides is another matter entirely.

Your grandmother was frightened before you were born. Not in the ordinary way that people are frightened, the startle at a loud noise or the anxiety before a difficult conversation. I mean something more precise. Decades before your parents met, before you existed as even a possibility, your grandmother experienced something that changed her at the molecular level. Methyl groups attached themselves to specific locations on her DNA. Genes that had been active went quiet. Genes that had been quiet began to speak. And that alteration, that chemical annotation of experience, passed forward. You carry it now.

There is a forest in the Pacific Northwest that has been thinking for four thousand years. I want you to sit with that sentence for a moment. Not to dismiss it as metaphor, not to immediately qualify it with objections about anthropomorphization or the hard problem of consciousness. Just to consider: what would it mean if something could think without a brain? What would it mean if memory could persist across millennia without neurons, without synapses, without anything we recognize as architecture for thought? This is not speculation. This is what the science of mycorrhizal networks has been revealing for the past three decades. Underground, beneath every forest floor you have ever walked, fungal threads thinner than human hair connect trees into communication systems of staggering complexity. A single cubic inch of forest soil contains enough mycorrhizal threads to stretch for miles if laid end to end. These threads carry chemical signals, nutrients, water, and information. When one tree is attacked by inse

There is a particular cruelty in forgetting. We dress it up in softer language. We call it moving on, healing, closure. We treat forgetting as the natural conclusion to grief, as though memory were a wound that needs to close rather than a responsibility that demands tending. But some wounds are not meant to close. Some wounds remain faithful precisely because closing them would constitute a second violence, an erasure layered upon the original harm. I have written a novel called "The Wound Remains Faithful: A Tragedy of Nora." It took me more than fifty years to write it, though I did not know I was writing it for most of that time. The book concerns a seventeen-year-old girl named Nora who walks out her front door one August morning and never comes home. She writes poems in a notebook hidden under her mattress. She has never seen the ocean. She will never see it now. What follows in the novel is not an investigation in any conventional sense. There is no detective piecing together clues. There is no satisfy

This is the particular tragedy of sons against fathers. The father does not see it coming. The father still thinks of the son as his child, as someone he made, as someone who carries his hopes. The father may have failed the son in a hundred ways. The father may have been imperious, neglectful, demanding, disappointed. But the father did not expect the blade. The father was still, in some part of himself, waiting for the reconciliation, for the return of the prodigal, for the moment when the son would finally understand. In the wake of the death of Rob Reiner and his wife by their son Nick, the knowledge before the act emerges as the cruelest part. The children saw what Nick was capable of. They felt the danger in their own bodies. And yet there was likely no mechanism available to them that could have stopped it. You cannot institutionalize someone for being frightening. You cannot compel treatment for an adult who refuses it. The law protects autonomy right up until the moment autonomy becomes lethal. So th

Martha's Vineyard. You know it now as a summer retreat for the wealthy, a place of pristine beaches and celebrity sightings. But between the late seventeenth century and the middle of the twentieth, something happened there that challenges everything we think we know about disability, about language, about what it means to belong. It began with a gene. Families from the Weald, a forested region in Kent, England, emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1600s. They were Puritans seeking religious freedom, and they carried with them, unknowingly, a recessive genetic trait for congenital Deafness. In 1694, a carpenter and farmer named Jonathan Lambert arrived on Martha's Vineyard with his hearing wife. Two of their seven children would be born Deaf. They were the first, but they would not be the last.

Listen to your own voice the next time you tell the truth. Notice how it flows, uninterrupted, from thought to speech. Now pay attention when you're about to lie. Feel it? That hesitation, that gathering of alternate reality before you speak it into being. Scientists have measured this pause. They've quantified it, studied it, turned it into data points and probability curves. But they haven't explained what happens inside it. That's what we're after today. Not the lie itself, but the space before the lie, that fraction of a second where consciousness does something remarkable and terrible and utterly human.

Today, we are standing in the wings of the theater, looking out at the empty stage, asking ourselves a question about the ghosts that haunt the floorboards. We are talking about the "Original Cast Recording" and how that static document, that moment frozen in time, can become a trap for every artist who follows. We are looking specifically at Wicked, a show that has not only defined a generation of theatergoers but has arguably altered the way we think about the "rightness" of a role versus the "reality" of the performer. Let us look first at the pen of the creator. Stephen Schwartz, the legendary composer, has spoken openly about crafting the score of Wicked specifically for Idina Menzel. He wasn't just writing for a green witch; he was writing for Idina. He heard the unique architecture of her larynx, that specific, stratospheric "belt" that sits somewhere between a scream and a prayer, and he built the song "Defying Gravity" to live exactly in that pocket.

Someone approaches you and asks for a piece of string. That's all they say. No context, no explanation, no qualifying details. Just: "Can I have a piece of string?" In that moment, you hold something more precarious than you might realize. You're standing at the intersection of mathematics, psychology, and potentially someone's survival. How do you answer? More importantly, how do you act?